Taking a break from the impact movies for a while, but don’t worry–they’ll be back. Meanwhile, please enjoy a Martian tangent.
You know, it takes Hollywood a few years to notice something interesting happening in the scientific world and then bastardize it until it’s unrecognizable milk every dollar it can from the public produce a movie on that theme. Often studios will produce similar movies on the same topic because they have no original ideas to capitalize on the public’s interest in that topic. As with the competing impact movies of two years prior, 2000 was the year of competing Mars movies, with Red Planet and Mission to Mars. The public’s rekindled interest in Mars was fueled both by the announcement of the discovery of the first extrasolar planets in the mid 1990s and also by the success of the Mars Pathfinder mission and its Sojourner rover.
Before the opening credits have finished rolling, you can already tell that Red Planet is the Armageddon to Mission to Mars’s Deep Impact. Much more attention is paid to visuals than to any real science. Having said that, I find Red Planet to be the more watchable of the two. It just squeaks in over the “so bad it’s good” line, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. However, Mars is a real place and we know a lot about it, so let’s see how Red Planet does.
We learn in the opening voiceover that humans are bioengineering Mars by sending algae to produce oxygen. (Aside: an opening voiceover can only mean one of two things in a film. Either the film came in way too long and they had to cut footage that contained important plot points, or the test screening audiences couldn’t tell what the heck was happening so they added some exposition.)
As we’ll see in many posts to come, the rotating space station made iconic by the film 2001 is a staple of sci-fi. A rotating module is the easiest and cheapest way we know to create artificial gravity in space. (Potential students: huge hint about future homework assignment here.) Unfortunately, the filmmakers here missed out on the rotating part. The station is just round. And yet there’s gravity. It’s like someone saw a drawing of what these things oughta look like, but didn’t bother to look into why.
At around 18 minutes in, there’s actually some sort-of-good science! A massive solar flare is headed for the Mars-bound ship, and the crew has a special safe room to hide in. Such a thing would certainly be necessary on any ship traveling to Mars. The way the events play out is a terrible depiction of reality, but plus one for actually getting something right.
Now we come to the Mars Landing. Mars’s atmosphere is incredibly thin compared to Earth’s, so parachutes only help slow you down a little. That’s why the first couple of generations of Mars rovers used airbags surrounding the landers. But even the newest Mars lander couldn’t use airbags because the lander was too massive. For our human crew, landing in a module surrounded by airbags means death. Partial credit for at least being grounded (cough) in reality.
Wait, Terence Stamp isn’t the same person as Malcolm McDowell? Which one killed Kirk? I’m so confused.
Around an hour into the film, they find Sojourner and gut it for its radio transmitter. I suppose this is somewhat plausible, so I will begrudgingly award the film a point. I feel ill–let’s get to some bad science, fast!
Throughout their time on Mars, the crew really struggle to walk in their heavy space suits. Assuming a typical astronaut weighs 200 lbs with a 100 lb spacesuit (on Earth), the suited astronaut would only way ~113 lbs on Mars. Even with some muscle atrophy on the trip, seems like they’d have a nice spring in their steps. The massive internal injuries they presumably suffered from their landing must be catching up with them.
I’m not even going to comment on how Val Kilmer leaves Mars at the end of this film. There’s bad science and then there’s just dumb. Instead let’s talk about terraforming a planet. In the film, the atmosphere of Mars has become breathable, and the astronauts walk around comfortably. In reality, Mars’s atmosphere is mostly CO2, but as discussed above, it’s thin. Just adding a bunch of algae and liberating oxygen from CO2 isn’t enough to make it breathable, you also have to make it quite a bit more dense. Plus Mars is cold. On the warmest possible day on Mars, it may get up to room temperature for a few minutes, but typical temperatures are around -60 degrees F, so even if you oxygenate the atmosphere to a breathable level, humans aren’t going to survive in the open very long. Rather than go into a whole lecture on terraforming (another hint, prospective students…) suffice it to say for now that the process is fraught with difficulties and Trinity‘s explanation at the beginning doesn’t quite cut it.